1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to using availability data shared among users to schedule conferences (including meetings) among users, and in particular to manage expenses for such conferences.
2. Description of the Related Art
A number of software applications are available for scheduling conferences among busy members of an enterprise or other organization For example, a commercial meeting scheduling application is available from Meeting Maker Inc. of Waltham, Mass.; and from Latitude of Santa Clara, Calif. (a subsidiary of Cisco Systems Inc. of San Jose, Calif.). These applications have in common a database that stores information related to a calendar of conferences and appointments each member is scheduled to attend. Such a database is herein called a shared electronic calendar. For purposes of the following discussion, the term conference includes any simultaneous coming together of multiple parties for communication, whether involving a meeting held in person or involving remote communications, including data, audio, video, or multi media communications, or some combination of in-person meetings and remote communications.
For example, some systems allow a conference organizer user (the “organizer”) to specify a list of mandatory attendees and a list of optional attendees from the organization. The scheduling application (“scheduler”) then determines one or more proposed times that all the mandatory attendees can attend a meeting based on data in the organization's shared electronic calendar. The proposed times are presented one at a time in chronological order. The scheduler also lists the optional attendees who are also available to attend each proposed time. The organizer then sends a message to the selected attendees for one of the proposed times, inviting them to attend the meeting.
While greatly simplifying the task of finding times when a limited number of persons are available for a conference, the existing systems still suffer some deficiencies.
For example, under some circumstances, such as when the list of mandatory attendees is large, the first proposed time may be too distant to be useful for the purposes of the conference. For example, the purpose of the meeting may be to determine what research results to present at an upcoming scientific convention. When the first proposed time is too close to, or after, the start of the convention, the first proposed time is not useful for accomplishing the purpose of the meeting. The existing systems do not give an organizer sufficient automatic choices to resolve such a scheduling conflict.
One approach would be for an organizer to identify one or more representative groups of persons. Any member of a representative group satisfies the needs of the conference, without requiring all or a particular member of the group to attend. With extant scheduling systems, an organizer can not define a representative group. Instead an organizer must determine a set of combinations of attendees, each combination having one attendee from each representative group. The organizer then has to enter all combinations manually and obtain one or more proposed dates for each combination. Then the organizer would have to review the large number of possible dates and select a best one, e.g., the earliest. This is a tedious, time consuming, and error-prone process. In most instances, the organizer would try a few of the combinations and then either give up or settle for a date that is not optimal.
For some conferences, cost matters. For example, the organizer may be required to conduct the conference within a specified cost budget, or to minimize costs. Even if the organizer perseveres through all manual combinations of one or more representative groups, or foregoes representative groups altogether, there still may be insufficient information from the calendar system to select the best one, e.g., the least costly or the earliest date with costs that fall within the cost budget.
Furthermore, even if a conference is scheduled that falls with a budget, there is additional tedious work imposed on the organizer. To verify that the conference falls within a cost budget, the organizer must manually establish the cost of the conference. For example, the organizer must obtain the costs for reserving a conference room (or multiple conference rooms if a multipoint remote conference is being held) and any equipment needed in those rooms. If refreshments or more substantial food are to be provided for one or more of the conference rooms, the organizer needs to determine the costs of such food. If one or more conference attendees are to travel to the location of one of the conference rooms, the costs of that travel must also be estimated. If the travel involves one or more overnight stays, then the costs of lodging and meals away from the conference must also be estimated. To do this, the conference organizer might log onto a billing system for the organizer's enterprise; determine the average or typical costs for one or more conference rooms of the appropriate size and with the appropriate equipment; and determine the typical costs for travel and daily lodging, board and travel incidentals. If the billing system lacks some of this information, the organizer may have to log onto one or more other systems that provide cost data, such as a travel agency website to determine the current fares between cities and hotel costs at each city involved in the conference.
After the costs are estimated, the organizer must then reserve the rooms, equipment, plane seats, hotels and other resources for the conference. To do this, the conference organizer often logs onto one or more other systems, such as a conference room reservation system for the organizer's organization or enterprise, an external airline reservation system, an external hotel reservation system, an external telephone conference reservation system, a network service provider reservation system, and an external catering reservations system.
During or after such reservation efforts, the organizer must obtain authorization for the organizer's organization to pay for the resources. For example, the organizer logs onto an enterprise billing system to fill out a purchase order request. The purchase order request typically requires the organizer to input data indicating a vendor, a resource to be procured, a delivery date, a cost, and an enterprise account to bear the costs. The organizer enters this data manually into the billing system.
In spite of the automation of the separate calendar, reservation and billing systems, the organizer is faced with a highly manual process. The information obtained from one system is manually input into one or more other systems. The same information might be input manually by the organizer multiple times, perhaps in different formats each time. The process is very tedious and subject to loss of concentration by the conference organizer and thus prone to data entry error. The process also consumes a substantial amount of the organizer's time and effort, leaving less time for other duties of the organizer. In some cases, the organizer's productivity suffers. In some cases, the organizer foregoes the conference and attempts to deal with the conference issues in another way, causing the organization to suffer with less effective means for dealing with issues.
Clearly, there is a need for a conference scheduling system that does not suffer the deficiencies of current conference scheduling systems. In particular, there is a need for a conference scheduling system that automatically manages expenses for a conference scheduled using data on the availability of persons or conference resources or both.
The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not to be considered prior art to the claims in this application merely due to the presence of these approaches in this background section.